As a student working in Burton Heights, you will have the opportunity to interact with culturally diverse clients and work on your language skills. You will have the opportunity to proactively approach clients searching for healthcare information and services. 

����app in the neighborhood

The Burton Heights neighborhood abounds in community resources like schools, clinics, and pantries. It has a large Spanish-speaking population, so you can have a chance to work on your language skills.

Students learn about the communicative struggles and social determinants of health, like transportation, safe neighborhoods, employment, education, and legal status.

Survey results

����app nursing students conducted community-based participatory research in 2002 with focus groups, community leaders, and door-to-door surveys. It identified neighborhood strengths, areas of growth, and solutions to residents' health concerns and how they thought ����app nursing students could partner with them to promote health in their areas of concern. Research was done again in 2009 and 2016.

Research demonstrated:

• Twenty-seven percent stated that they have had to choose between paying for essentials, like food or rent, and buying medical care.
• Thirty-two percent agree that lack of health insurance prevents them from receiving the health care that they need.
• Sixty-five percent are Spanish-speaking.
• Thirty-seven percent visited the ER in the last year (2008).
• The top five neighborhood health issues addressed were lack of access to health care, mental health asthma, diabetes, and hypertension.
• They believe that family, education, and faith are important in day-to-day life.

Download the Burton Heights survey results

Opportunities

You'll have opportunities to work in a variety of community settings. Work in clinics, food pantries, schools (with home care and public health nurses), and client homes.

As one of the hallmarks of the program, you and your peers will team up community health workers. Rather than waiting on people to approach health care providers, you can bring health education to them. Talk to parent groups in schools and churches. Go to public spaces like food pantries, exercise classes, and even door-to-door. You'll see how to care for your patients while being culturally sensitive and linguistically compatible.

The variety of experiences, combined with the diversity of individuals and the complex community needs, will challenge your Christian ethics, provide valuable learning, and serve one of Christ's vulnerable populations.

With an established presence in the Creston-Belknap neighborhood, you will focus on health education for the whole community and learn how to make strategic plans for a neighborhood.  

Long-term partnership

����app nursing students have had the privilege of working with the Creston and Belknap neighborhoods for many years now. By partnering with one another, the Creston-Belknap neighborhoods and ����app nursing department aim to promote the health of the neighborhood residents and provide community-based experiences for students.

����app nursing students completed a random door-to-door survey of Creston and Belknap residents in the springs of 2004, 2011, and 2018. 

From the initial data in 2004, a neighborhood strategic plan was established, and it's updated yearly.  First-semester junior students participate in activities within the strategic plan. They teach health-related topics to students age five through 18, do blood pressure and blood sugar screenings, and work with neighborhood clinic nurses. Junior students also meet with a resident of the neighborhood to promote the individual’s health.

Second-semester senior students assist in ongoing neighborhood assessment and review of the strategic plan. Senior students use a public health model to plan, publicize, and present the annual Palmer (elementary school) Health Fair. A third major activity for the senior-level students is participation in the Community Health Worker (CHW) Program. A lay CHW is paired with two nursing students to create a CHW team. Each team identifies an area to meet with residents, finds out where residents gather, or go door-to-door talking to residents about their health. For example, some residents go to Supper House, an outreach of North End Community Ministry (NECM), where residents can be served a free hot meal every Thursday evening. The most frequent resident concerns are access to health care, such as dental care, available health clinics, health insurance programs, and prescription assistance programs.

Maintaining a presence in the Creston-Belknap neighborhoods serves a two-fold purpose for the ����app community: We are able to show to others the compassion that Christ displays to each of us, and also learn valuable lessons from those whose experiences differ from our own.

As a student in the Heartside neighborhood, you will work with a large homeless population, listen to the voice of the patient, and account for their environment.

Working in the Heartside neighborhood sheds new light on what it means to be image bearers of Christ.

-Lauren Schuitema

Heartside is our newest neighborhood partnership, begun in 2011.

Heartside neighborhood has been “home“ to the homeless for many years. Many Heartside residents live in shelters or subsidized housing. The neighborhood has no single-family dwellings. Apartment buildings, hotels, commercial buildings, churches, missions, and other providers of services to the homeless are prevalent in the neighborhood. Nearly 75 percent of the Heartside population is single males between the ages of 35-64, and most have limited resources.

Download the Heartside survey results

The nursing department is currently conducting a neighborhood survey/assessment. The results will be used to set goals and identify projects, which we will undertake to improve the neighborhood health.

There are two missions in the neighborhood, Guiding Light Mission and Mel Trotter Ministries. Our work in the Heartside Neighborhood provides health screening, health education, flu immunizations, and answers to individual people about their health and health-promotion activities.

In the first clinical course of their junior year, students learn skills such as therapeutic communication, nursing care planning, and client assessment, which includes taking blood pressure. In each neighborhood, students in the first semester are paired with an adult and child client. They assess the clients and provide health education.

Students also provide group education for a partner school's classroom and a neighborhood adult group. They “shadow” nurses in community settings to begin to understand the roles of a nurse.

While working in Heartside, students learn to listen to the client and the neighborhood. They learn to see how the environment affects the client’s health. Students focus on educating and advocating.

Students have a variety of opportunities to work in the neighborhood. One of them, the Heartside Drop-in Depot, focuses on connecting people with the resources they need, such as:

• Contact with primary care providers
• Information on how to understand medications
• What things have a detrimental effect on their health
• Basic health programs, like a fitness walking program

Since walking is the primary mode of transportation in Heartside, once a month, LaGrave Avenue Christian Reformed Church provides a place to meet clients in a relaxed setting and do a foot spa.

“Working in the Heartside neighborhood sheds new light on what it means to be image bearers of Christ," says Lauren Schuitema, the nursing faculty member who works in Heartside. As students interact with people different than themselves, they are able to gain confidence in their conversation skills, and barriers between nurses and patients come down.